"Do you hear that?" Savannah asked. "I can't hear anything with Chuck yapping." Which I began to suspect was the point.

"Something's in here." She bent to unlatch the coffin. "Are mice scavengers? If so, I think we have a nest of them chowing down at the body buffet."

My "wait!" came out like the squeak of a mouse, which must be what she mistook it for, because she threw open the lid. The corpse leapt up like a jack-in-the-box, shriek­ing and gobbling, fingers worn through from battering the casket, bone tips clawing the air, flesh tatters waving.

I'd seen this coming, but I still fell back. Even Savan­nah did, punctuating hers with a "holy fucking shit!"

At the sound of her voice, the zombie went still. His head swiveled toward her. Then, with the grace of a landlocked hippo, he lurched over the side of the casket. Savannah stepped back and the zombie—his internal bits and bones out of whack—hit the floor, limbs sprawled.

"Dude, chill." Savannah brushed a stray bit of flesh from her jeans. "Do we look like grave robbers? Your cousin brought this nice necromancer here, and I'm guess­ing he wanted her to help you out of your predicament."

The zombie looked around but, of course, couldn't see the ghost, who'd taken a seat on an empty berth and watched, arms crossed, waiting for me to get on with my job.

After a moment, the zombie got up. It wasn't easy. His left leg had evidently been broken in the accident and cor­oners didn't reset bones on dead people.

He propped himself against the berth and looked at us, his gaze keen and very human. A real zombie isn't the shambling brain-chomper of movie myth. It's a ghost returned to its corpse. Simple .. . and simply horrifying.

"So how did this happen?" I asked.

"What the fuck does it matter how it happened?" he shouted, voice garbled, wheezing through a hole in his throat. "Get me out of this rotting corpse!"